Mac OSX Writing Markdown and Taking Screenshots

Background

I’m doing a lot of documentation for our current iteration. Since we’re in github quite a bit, and want to keep documentation there (and transform it later if necessary), we’re in the Markdown world.

Writing Markdown

Please not another editor. Too bad. But anyway, I’ve been using Mou – Markdown Editor for Web Developers for a few days now, and it’s just about perfect for my needs. It has a split screen view so you can see what you’re doing. No more or less than I need.

Screen Capture

For screen captures, I just discovered Skitch. This is a terrific little tool that makes capturing – and subsequently naming, or dragging and dropping, or marking up images – comically simple.

The image of Mou above was captured with Skitch. As was the image below – which was captured, marked up, and simply dragged and dropped right into this post. Complete with nifty arrows and a sweet little sticky with an ‘X’ on it. You can also change formats, crop, and pixelate, among other things.

Resizing a Skitch Note

This was a little tricky for me to find. You have to first select the crop tool, and then toggle to resize mode. Although it seems the one thing I couldn’t capture with Skitch was Skitch itself (as it hides itself while you’re taking a screen capture), we can do a regular Mac screen capture, and then just open the file in Skitch. So here’s where you find resize: